Celestial Shamanka
I have been pondering the Niger documents
Wed Jul 16 15:33:24 2003
208.152.73.181

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Intelligence Blog - Niger Forgery Analysis: connecting the dots to Cheney & Chalabi
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 01:52:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Celestial Shamanka celestial_shamanka@yahoo.com

http://www.xymphora.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

I have been pondering the Niger documents and am having trouble with the story as it has been presented. There were four documents. They have been described as 'crude forgeries' (a summary of all the reports on the forgeries is here). What is wrong with them?:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085616/

* one of the documents purports to be a letter signed by Tandjia Mamadou, the president of Niger, with a childlike signature that is clearly not his;

* another document was written on paper from a 1980's military government in Niger (the "Supreme Military Council"), bears the date of October 10, 2000, and bears the signature of foreign minister Allele Elhadj Habibou, a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger for 14 years; and

* one letter referred to the Niger constitution of 1965, which had been superseded by a new constitution in 1999.

There are two obvious anomalies with these documents:

1. the actual forgery is incompetently done, but using paper that would not be available to the average amateur forger; and

2. there is some kind of weird time warp going on, with the forger appearing to operate on the basis of information that is ten to fifteen years out of date.

How do we explain this? I think the forger used as his starting point copies of genuine documentation involving the government of Niger and the government of Iraq. The only unusual aspect of this is that these documents were from the 1980's. In other words, the forger took copies of documents from fifteen years ago, and cut and pasted them to look like they were documents from a few years ago. So the forger must have been an individual who:

1. is not a professional intelligence agent, as a professional would have done a much better job and wouldn't have made the serious and obvious errors,

2. is not from Niger, for someone from Niger wouldn't have made the errors, and

3. is someone who had access to internal Iraqi government files from the 1980's.

In other words, the forger was almost certainly a functionary in the Iraqi bureaucracy of the 1980's, who took copies of the Niger documents with him when he defected out of Iraq. He is almost certainly one of the Iraqi defectors that Cheney has been using to provide much of the raw material on which the attack on Iraq was justified. All this talk about Italian intelligence, and French intelligence, and intelligence sources from 'another country', and a mysterious diplomat from Niger, are all fog meant to confuse the issue. From what information we have, the information flow is likely as follows:

1. Cheney and Chalabi decide it would be a good idea if some documentary evidence were to surface tying Saddam into recent attempts to buy nuclear materials.

2. One of Chalabi's cronies, who worked for Saddam in the 1980's and has since defected with as many incriminating documents as he could carry, uses some of his old Niger documents to cut and past some rough forgeries, without even bothering to get the minor details right as he knows that the recipients of these forgeries aren't going to look at them too critically (Niger was specifically picked as one of Saddam's Ambassador to the Vatican in Rome had recently visited there, and this visit had led to rumors that the purpose of the visit was related to the acquisition of uranium).

3. The documents end up with Cheney and/or Rumsfeld, who pass them on to their Office of Special Plans, the sausage factory led by Abram Shulsky which was set up to create lies without the interference of the professional intelligence agencies, and from there directly to Ariel Sharon's office, as Sharon plays a special hand's on role in the creation of the lies.

4. In the sausage factory, the lies get made into part of the whole framework of lies to justify the attack on Iraq.

5. Either the Americans or the Israelis pass the documents on to the Italians, so that their provenance will seem less obvious.

6. The Italians pass on summaries (the Italians are now claiming they didn't provide any documents, but haven't mentioned summaries) to the British (so the British didn't actually see the documents until after they were denounced by the International Atomic Energy Agency; there is some question about this in that some reports have it that the documents went to MI6 and then to Cheney) and the British are also led to obtain the same information from another source other than the United States, probably Israel, so that Blair can claim he has multiple sources independent of the United States (the British are trying to claim that the sources were France and Italy, with the French unwilling to supply the information to the Americans, a story which doesn't make sense since the French had to have known that Niger couldn't have supplied the uranium - see below).

7. The British include the Niger claims in a dossier.

8. One of Cheney's people, probably specifically Robert G. Joseph, puts the 16 words in the State of the Union address, worded so they can blame the whole thing on Blair's dossier if they need to.

The Americans have said that the source for the documents was neither Israel nor Britain, a statement which is probably true. The forgery was probably by a non-professional forger who created a mess of a forgery, but with careful manipulation of the intelligence trail the Americans managed to get it into Blair's dossier, where it formed the basis of the sixteen words in the State of the Union speech (note that Bush said that the British learned that Saddam had sought uranium in Africa, which implies more than that the British thought this to be true, but that it actually was true). Contrary to what Rice is now saying, the sixteen words were absolutely crucial to the case for the attack on Iraq. Since the whole argument depended on the necessity for war due to the imminent risk of attack to the United States, and the aluminum tubes story had been largely discredited, the Niger uranium was the only real evidence the Bush Administration had to justify the attack. Even worse, perhaps, was the fact that Cheney was using these same nuclear arguments at a time when he knew them to be lies (he gave a speech on August 26, 2002 stating that Saddam could "directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail" when Ambassador Wilson had given his report in May 2002), in order to influence the Congressional debate on the subject. Perhaps the most interesting fact in all of this, and something which flows directly from the fact that the British, the Americans and the Israelis all intentionally did their sausage making in offices separated from their respective intelligence agencies, is that Niger could not possibly have provided this uranium to Iraq. The International Atomic Energy Agency investigated the documents carefully (it was Jacques Baute who almost immediately determined they were fakes), and indeed had unsuccessfully insisted on seeing them for months, only receiving them when they complained to the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, because it knew that all of Niger's production was under the complete control of an international consortium, and was all shipped to France, Japan and Spain under absolute security. The amounts in question couldn't possibly have been sent to Iraq without anyone noticing. An expert on the situation would know immediately that Niger couldn't have supplied this uranium, so the documents had to be fake. But neither the original forger, nor the people in the sausage factories in Israel, Britain or the United States knew this (I think Cheney may have suspected it as he insisted that Ambassador Wilson be sent by the CIA to Niger to check the matter out). We know that the CIA never accepted the documents as genuine, but the whole structure of the sausage factory was intended to exclude the CIA from having any meaningful input. The fact that Britain is still trying to claim that the report is accurate (and suggesting that Ambassador Wilson is some form of idiot), with references to mysterious intelligence source(s) including, of all countries, France (who may be playing along with this to do Tony the poodle a favor), is incredible.
posted 4:42 AM

Sunday, July 13, 2003

George Tenet has been muscled by Condoleezza Rice into falling on his sword to save his President from allegations that he lied to the American people in the State of the Union address (CBS is having trouble reporting on the lie without the annoying syndrome of 'headline drift'!). He has given a quite remarkable statement taking the full blame for the Niger uranium fiasco, on the basis that the CIA saw Bush's State of the Union address before it was given and didn't say anything:

1. The technical reason the CIA is said to have kept its mouth shut is the same dumb reason used as the excuse by the Bush Administration - because the Niger assertion specifically refers to a British government source, it wasn't technically incorrect, as the British government source had in fact made the allegation. Needless to say, this is nonsense. The State of the Union address isn't supposed to be a speech given by a trickster trying to con the American public, and Bush can't get away with stating something that the Administration knows is highly questionable just because the British wrote a report about it. The CIA knows that this is a completely bogus excuse, and so Tenet's explanation for why they didn't say anything makes no sense.

2. Tenet and Rice can't even keep their lies straight. Tenet in his statement said:

"Portions of the State of the Union speech draft came to the CIA for comment shortly before the speech was given. Various parts were shared with cognizant elements of the Agency for review. Although the documents related to the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal had not yet been determined to be forgeries, officials who were reviewing the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed. From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct – i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."
On the other hand, Rice said:

"The CIA cleared on it. There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared. Now, I can tell you, if the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question."
But the changes she is referring to relate to "specifics about amount and place," i. e., specific references to amounts of uranium and countries from which Iraq was seeking to obtain it. She claimed the CIA did not object to the assertion that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Africa, when in fact Tenet's statement makes it clear that the CIA did so object, and only got around their objection with the technicality of relying on the British report. Another account has it that Tenet himself (?) vetted the entire address and removed any reference to 'yellow cake' or the specific country of Niger, while Tenet implies he did not personally see the speech. This is the difficulty of creating a lie when one party is in Africa and the other in Washington.

3. Rice knew that the Niger story was false months before the State of the Union address was delivered (from the MSNBC story):

"But U.S. officials told NBC News' Andrea Mitchell that Tenet himself advised Rice’s top deputy, Steven Hadley, to remove a reference to the uranium report from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, establishing that the nation's top intelligence officials suspected that the allegation was false more than three months before they approved Bush’s repeating it in his nationally televised address on Jan. 28."

Rice's argument is that Bush is off the hook because the CIA, when given a chance to say something, didn't comment on the inclusion of the Niger claim in the State of the Union address. But Rice knew. She knew it was false, or at least highly questionable, and yet let it stand in the speech. How can she possibly think that the Bush Administration can get away with pinning this on the CIA? Someone wrote the State of the Union address, and expressly included something which they all knew to be highly questionable. How does the fact that they ran this by the CIA absolve them of lying to mislead the country into a very bad war? Rice said:

"If the CIA - the director of central intelligence - had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone. We have a high standard for the president’s speeches."
Not so high that they wouldn't say things that they knew to be highly questionable.

4. Former US ambassador Joseph Wilson (or here - article dated June 8, 2003) was the fellow that the CIA sent to Niger to investigate the original claims about Saddam's alleged attempts to obtain uranium there. Who put pressure on the CIA to send someone to check? None other than Dick Cheney (note that Tenet goes out of his way in his statement to note that Wilson was sent by CIA counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, as if that point was in issue)! Now, we're supposed to believe that no one bothered to tell Cheney the results of Wilson's report, and that Cheney wasn't curious enough to ask. Wilson says that the CIA, the State Department, the U. S. National Security Council and the Vice-President's office were all informed of the results of his investigation. Did Dick Cheney not read the State of the Union Address before it was given? Why didn't he say anything about the problems with the Niger story? Ari Fleischer has said specifically:

"The vice president's office did not request the mission to Niger. The vice president's office was not informed of his mission. He was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent press reports accounted for it."
Who do you believe, Wilson or Fleischer?

5. Just eight days after the State of the Union address, Colin Powell specifically left the Niger claim out of his address to the United Nations. He said:

"I didn’t use the uranium at that point because I didn’t think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world."
So it wasn't strong enough to present before the world, but presumably was strong enough to present to the American people. Powell said he read the State of the Union speech before it was delivered. Why didn't he say anything?

6. Lots of people in the Bush Administration, including Bush, Cheney and Rice, knew that the CIA had strong misgivings about the Niger claim. They knew that these misgivings had existed for months. The CIA knew that the Bush Administration knew that the CIA had these misgivings. In fact, as mentioned above, the CIA had already blocked the use of the allegations in a previous Bush speech on October 7. Tenet was personally involved in this previous case. The State of the Union address was passed by the CIA for comments, and it contained the Niger claim. Wouldn't it be natural for the CIA to assume that its misgivings had been overridden, particularly in the light of the fact that they had already made exactly the same comments on a previous speech? After all, the CIA works for Bush. If it starts to nit pick about something which Bush may feel has already been dealt with, the CIA may find itself in trouble with the Administration. If I keep telling you that something is a lie, and then you show me a speech you are about to give which states that the very thing is true, would

• Re: I have been pondering the Niger documents — good possibility, Wed Jul 16 21:02
• Weapons of Mass Destruction (Full coverage) — Washington Post, Thu Jul 17 00:06